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Caution: The Story Line Is Slippery

Glenn Close and Tate Donovan in Damages. Credit
Patrick Harbron/Sony Pictures Television

A FEW weeks ago on the set of “Damages,” the FX legal thriller, Glenn Close and Tate Donovan were waging their seventh or eighth showdown of the afternoon. On a Brooklyn soundstage built to look like a pristine Manhattan law office, the actors were rehearsing a scene that began with Ms. Close, who plays the ruthless litigator Patty Hewes, disagreeing about tactics with her adviser Tom Shayes (Mr. Donovan) and ended with her firing him. They practiced several approaches to the argument, from simmering, restrained anger to all-out screaming, leaving their characters depleted and devastated.

While Ms. Close played with her dogs during a break, a director called for a crew member to mark her location. “I’m not marking her,” Mr. Donovan jokingly shouted back. “Did you see what happened to the last guy who tried to mark her?”

The resentment may be fake, but the tension on “Damages” is very real. The second season of the show, which begins on Wednesday, arrives more than a year after the conclusion of the first, a season of 13 serpentine, unapologetically complicated episodes.

Beneath the plot’s outermost shell — the cutthroat rivalry between Patty Hewes and her young apprentice Ellen Parsons (played by Rose Byrne) — were mysteries within mysteries: Would Patty prevail in a class-action suit against the corporate titan Arthur Frobisher (a menacing, silver-maned Ted Danson)? Who at Patty’s law firm was secretly passing information to Frobisher’s defense team? How was Ellen’s fiancé’s sister’s lover connected to the case? Who killed Ellen’s fiancé, and who tried to kill Ellen?

As it explored the shifting balances of power among its characters, “Damages” had to address a predicament that all serialized shows — even those that are less intricate — must face: How would it hold on to an audience from episode to episode and still maintain a frenetic weekly production schedule? To answer this, its creators evolved an off-the-cuff writing style that has enthralled and alienated viewers while it surprises, baffles and aggravates its cast.

One might assume that Ms. Close, who has played her share of intimidating characters in films from “Fatal Attraction” to “101 Dalmatians,” is the reigning authority on the “Damages” set. It was, after all, the autocratic magnetism of the Patty Hewes character that initially drew her to its pilot script — an opportunity to explore “how people characterize women in positions of power who are smart and manipulative and unforgiving in certain ways,” Ms. Close said. “Which basically is the way men behave when they’re in positions of power.”

But even Ms. Close takes her marching orders from someone: in this case the show’s creators and executive producers, Daniel Zelman and the brothers Glenn and Todd A. Kessler, known collectively around the set by the initials KZK. “I’m just the final filter for getting their meaning and intention exactly right,” Ms. Close said.

Exactly what KZK means or wants, however, is often subject to debate. Going back to the creation of “Damages,” the creators developed a loose, spontaneous writing process, necessitated by a breakneck production schedule: FX ordered the first season of the series in April 2007 and began broadcasting it that July. “Really we were flying by the seat of our pants and functioning by instinct,” said Todd Kessler, a former writer and producer of “The Sopranos.”

This arrangement, the “Damages” creators said, gave them ultimate flexibility in their storytelling, to choose to kill off Ellen’s fiancé without yet knowing whodunit, or to leave open the door for the Arthur Frobisher character to return in Season 2, even though he was shot in the first-season finale. (Sure enough, Mr. Danson is back, sporting a full beard and confined to a hospital bed.)

In an age of Internet spoilers, the producers said, such spontaneity is required to surpass the expectations of their viewers. “The audience thinks it wants something, but that’s only because that’s what they’ve seen before,” Mr. Zelman said. “They’re not thinking of all the possibilities.” Sometimes, he said, “the very thing they thought maybe they didn’t want, you can do it in such a way that they liked it anyway.” Overthinking the writing process, he said, “can be a trap.”

Photo

Rose Byrne and Timothy Olyphant on the show, entering its second season.Credit
Patrick Harbron/Sony Pictures Television

For the “Damages” cast, however, this meant adjusting to receiving final script pages on the night before or the day of a shoot, and filming scenes without knowing what they meant to their characters or the overall plot.

“There are times,” Mr. Donovan said, “where it’s so complicated I am just like: ‘You know what? I’m just going to learn these lines, and I’m going to say them, and I’m going to be as present as possible.’ Because who knows how they’re going to use it?”

The system had mixed results. In its first season “Damages” was well reviewed, but its serialized narrative made it difficult for new viewers to jump into later episodes. Its audience declined to about 1.4 million for its finale from about 3.7 million viewers for its debut. But FX renewed it for two additional seasons, concluding that “Damages” helped further its tradition of stark, stylized shows like “Nip/Tuck,” “Rescue Me” and “The Shield.”

The KZK team took that renewal as a validation of the show’s dense narrative, which juggles five or six plotlines per episode and shuttles forward and backward in time, though they said they have made changes of their own volition to make Season 2 more accessible. This year, they said, they will feature more self-contained, single-episode stories and distinguish more carefully between events occurring in the present and in the future.

They were further inspired by an off-season pep talk from Steven Bochco, a creator of “Hill Street Blues” and “L.A. Law.” “He was just encouraging us to tell the best stories, that you have to trust yourself,” Todd Kessler said. (Mr. Bochco declined to comment for this article.)

The writers’ strike effectively dashed their hope of getting ahead of schedule on Season 2, but it did not diminish their narrative ambitions: starting with the unresolved conflicts among Ellen Parsons, Patty Hewes, Tom Shayes and Arthur Frobisher, the new season of “Damages” adds a story line about an energy consultant (William Hurt) with insider knowledge about a toxic chemical compound and who has a mysterious past connection to Patty Hewes; new characters played by Timothy Olyphant and Marcia Gay Harden will also figure prominently.

Needless to say, the 11th- and 12th-hour script revisions are still a fundament part of the “Damages” process. “Around here,” Ms. Byrne said in her dressing room, “you learn not to hang onto anything. Nothing’s gospel in this building.”

But not everyone shares this begrudging acceptance of the KZK strategy. Mr. Hurt, a newcomer, said he was often frustrated that he did not understand his role or his story line as well as his veteran cast mates understood theirs. “I don’t think in the rush to get the second season going that I was given the same moment of reflection,” he said, “so that I could come up with an idea for my character.”

Comparing his method to a scientific principle of condensation (by which, he said, “latent humidity doesn’t become visible moisture until there’s a particulate in the air to which it can attach”), Mr. Hurt said, “I’m not really an artist until I have something to attach myself to.” He said his annoyance was offset by the satisfaction of working with Ms. Close, his longtime friend and “Big Chill” co-star, but added: “I felt like the person on the set who knew the least. I had to wonder whether I’m a spoiled brat for having worked in a different format.”

Other cast members, however, said that the show’s impromptu writing process offered them a greater degree of input into their characters. Ms. Byrne said that after expressing her first-season reservations to the KZK team — “the audience knew more than Ellen,” she said, “so she kind of came off stupid, because everyone was one step ahead of her” — she was rewarded with a Season 2 story line that was darker and more dynamic. (Among other things, her character gets to handle firearms and attend grief counseling.) “This season’s been a lot richer for me,” she said. “I’ve enjoyed it much more.”

As they prepare for a third season of the show, the “Damages” creators are confident their methodology can win over a bigger audience too. At a recent focus group where first-time viewers were shown episodes, Glenn Kessler said, “There was one person who said that he hated the show because he didn’t know where it was going. And then when they asked him if he would watch the next episode, he was like: ‘Of course. I have to find out where it was going.’ So that was exciting.”